The Townsend Report

This is a guest blog post from Dmitri Riz, the director of InfoStrat's Microsoft Dynamics Practice. We are all familiar with Business Process Flows (BPF) in Dynamics 365 – they’ve been around for a while. The set of chevrons at the top of the single record form typically represents major phases in the record’s lifecycle. Phases of record lifecycle or BPF The problem When starting a new project, we usually end up designing and building a set of BPFs for the most important records in our system. However, one of the first questions we often hear from users after the new project goes live is “Is there a way to hide BPF area of the form?”. The real-life usage of BPFs sometimes falls short of the promise to make users' lives easier by guiding them through a business process. The reason many users often fail to see much utility in BPFs is that a typical BPF is weakly connected to actual processes users go through when working with data and often fails to serve as an enforc

This month InfoStrat released new versions and new editions of Grants Manager Plus to help grantors track the entire grant life cycle, from funding sources to awards, reporting, and closeout. This blog will feature a future post which provides detail on new features, but here are highlights: New process flows for grants which pass through to sub-recipients and those which do not Planning tools for top-down planning of spending based on action plans Enhanced payment validation rules Milestone-based payment gates User interface improvements Portal enhancements for Dynamics portal such as improved navigation for multi-page application forms Deeper project management functions such as budgeting New editions combine features appropriate to specific grant programs: Disaster recovery grants such as HUD CDBG-DR and FEMA Victim services grants such as VOCA, VAWA and SVAP Public safety grants For more information on grant management and Microsoft Grants Manager Plus, see my

One of the biggest challenges for IT services companies like my company InfoStrat is to stay current with the latest product releases and to keep learning new things even while we are engaged with demanding projects on behalf of our clients. For this reason, we have created multiple ways to collaborate and share with one another.  This week we are conducting internal training sessions to allow a forum for our consultants to share what they are doing, the problems they are solving, and new things they have recently learned. I thought that some of my readers might be interested in the topics that we cover, so here is a partial list of presentations from our agenda: Understanding Microsoft Flow Building a configurable framework for a complex website using Azure Service Fabric and Sitecore Working on Agile projects with large offshore teams Collaboration with Microsoft Teams Creating advanced form navigation on Microsoft Dynamics Portal to allow skipping to specified sect